HACKING your Topology in Blender!

so I was working on this model earlier and I ran into a really tricky situation which I think is a great tutorial idea because you'll probably run into something similar as well and you're going to need to know the thought process to know how to fix it so if we take a look at this thing it's basically a sphere and I wanted to create some sort of entryway here and fuse that entryway to the sphere and you're going to see this isn't something you can easily do per se if we go into edit mode you're going to see I have really clean topology as well for those of you that care and it looks pretty much completely seamless if you take a look at it so how exactly did I accomplish this so if I go in here and I take a UV Sphere for example subdivide it a few times and maybe just scale it up you know more or less the same size and we go here you know you might think okay I'm just going to go into the front view here and I'm going to you know chop off the bottom so let me quickly add in a plane what we'll do with the plane as well extrude it down and then use this as a Boolean and then we'll just apply that bull in so you might be thinking okay basically what I can do here is I can you know extrude out some of these vertices here or whatever and technically you could do this but you're certainly not going to get the same result because of the curvature of these faces here you know I could extrude this out on the x-axis here I could run a subdivision and you're going to see we just simply don't get at the same quality results that we have here the approach I actually took was with a Boolean operation and I'm going to show you how you can finesse this now keep in mind I was using quadri measure for part of this but you don't technically need it if you're not concerned with the topology so what I'm going to do here is I'm going to go back to the sphere and what I'm going to do is basically add in another UV sphere and I'm going to move it up and then I'm just going to get it roughly the same size has this one right here and I'll move this one over okay and then just like I did before let's go ahead and remove the bottom just use this object as a Boolean cutter and then we can go ahead and apply that blue end so essentially what I did here was I took a cube I'm going to go over here and I scaled the cube down a bit and I basically fused this Cube to the mesh so what I'm going to do here is I'm going to move this out a bit pretend this is going to be our entryway so I'll try to make it roughly the same size and we'll just kind of move this up right and then what I'll do is apply the scale and then maybe just add in a nice chamfer here just to make the entryway look a little bit more interesting and the reason I'm showing this to you guys is because if you're going for concept renders there's going to be a lot of situations where you kind of want to finesse the result because it's just going to be easier that way so essentially I just had to think one step at a time I had to think okay first thing I need to do is I need to get a general shape connected to the Sphere not even going to worry about the bevel now once I've created that what I need to do is I need to fuse this piece to the object so that way I can add a bevel where these two are connected so we're going to go ahead and add in a union Boolean and I'm going to apply it and now we should be able to take these edges here and bevel them but you're going to see um first thing I noticed was that this isn't actually flush this edge here isn't flush with this one so what I'm actually going to do before I apply that Boolean is take this face let me undo this real quick I'm going to take this face right here go into vertex snap and then press g z and just snap it right there so that way we're on the same plane and then we can go ahead and use a union and if it disappears that's simply because we need to change the solver over to exact because it's on the same plane so we're going to go ahead and apply that and now what we need to do is figure out how exactly we get this bevel going first thing you're going to notice is the topology here on the bottom it's overlapping and a bit nasty so we're going to do is simply delete out these faces just I'm going to reconnect everything no worries but for now let's just completely get rid of this clean everything up and what we could do is we could simply fill this manually with no issues right so if I try to run a bevel now this is where things get tricky because what's happening is um I try to run the bevel and it's just going to start overlapping with the geometry almost immediately and especially at this point down here we just run into an absolute mess right so I could bevel it I could try using offset cut but even if I use offset cut we still have um a massive mess here on the bottom because offset cut is meant to be used in a cyclic formation not kind of ended here so this is where you kind of have to think about when you're working on these types of models how can you finesse it just to get the result oftentimes I'll do something completely you know incorrect I guess you could say in order to get the correct result and this is the type of stuff tutorials don't necessarily teach it's I'm trying to teach you the thought process here how can I finesse this to get the result I want right so basically what you can do is in this case what I did was I simply extruded this face down right that's all I did I extruded this face down and now what happened when I selected this area is it selected all the way down to this Edge right here so now when I bevel it we're kind of getting somewhere you see what I mean now that we have the bevel continuing as expected right the only issue we have are the overlaps and now if we try to use the offset cut feature boom it's actually working much better than it did before now in this case you're going to see it starts overlapping and stuff but the good part is I don't care because I'm using this portion that I just extruded as the finessing portion I guess you could say so all I'm worried about is how does it look Above This Extrusion so if I go ahead and bevel this you're going to see the bevel is exactly what I needed we can do that and I'll check this out all we need to do is come back in here with a plane and use this plane and just run another Boolean so we'll scale this a bit right invert the normals make sure they're correct and then what I can do is go in here run my different spool and we're going to make sure again this is set to exact and look at that we've basically used that Extrusion to finesse the result we want here and I do this all the time I just don't really make tutorials on it you're going to see we do have a little bit of a problem right here most likely due to this vertex let's go ahead and apply the Boolean and take a look let's see what exactly is causing this so you're going to see the topology is a bit of a mess like I said if you're concerned with the topology I'll show you how to quickly fix it so what I could do here is you know I could just submerge this down maybe dissolve that one out and we're going to have something that is a lot closer to what I wanted right and I could you know go to the bottom view here and line this up a bit more manually you could even use the mirror tools add-on if you wanted to make this like perfectly smooth I could go in here right and I could select these I don't have mirror tools installed right now but you could try using things like Loop tools to kind of relax it a bit press shift r a few times and I've basically spaced everything out evenly see what I did there and then I can symmetrize to the other side and get that and now at this point if you're someone who's just going for a concept render you don't really need to worry about the topology here but if you were going for clean topology this is where the more advanced tools like quad remaster really come in handy so what I could do is I could take a look at you know roughly how many triangles we have on this one I don't need to go like crazy low or crazy high but I could just use quadri mesher here to completely remesh this object and now if I go into edit mode look at that and I could run a sub D modifier it might have actually been a better idea to re-mesh it with a lower polygon count so maybe 5000 so that way I could use sub d so now it's a bit lower resolution but now I could actually use sub D to kind of get that nice bevel around those harder edges right and that is exactly how you can use booleans and these different topology hacks in order to get cool results like this which normally seem really tricky to do I personally do this all the time I know it's not the correct way to do things but the simple fact of the matter is I don't care I want to get the result I want and if I can go the nasty route I guess you could say I'm going to go ahead and do that it's the best way to get these results so now at this point you can basically use your regular hard service model and workflow so what I could do here is I could kind of tighten up all these edges by using a crease we'll set the crease value here to one so now we have perfectly hard edges let me turn the auto smooth back on and now I can just go ahead and apply that sub d drop a you know bevel modifier to get that nice highlight on the hard edges and I'm basically back to my hard surface modeling workflow in a fraction of the time so whenever you guys are thinking about a tricky situation like this and you have absolutely no idea how to approach it think about how you could finesse the situation how you could basically brute force your way through and get basically the same exact result by just hacking the system that's exactly what I've done here and this is exactly what I do in a lot of my hard surface modeling workflows I just don't usually show it in tutorials because I don't always run into them so I hope this gave you some ideas hope it gave you some different approaches and ways to think so that way when you run into a situation you can use your you know analytical skills to think about how to tackle that tough situation blender is you know highly analytical and you have to think outside the box sometimes to get the results you want so I hope this video helped you if it did I really appreciate a thumbs up helps me out a lot and you can also check out some of our hard surface modeling courses and products over on blunderbrows.com and also check out our free hard surface modeling jumpstart course if you're brand new to this stuff it'll get you up to speed very quickly thanks a bunch see you in the next one

Channel: Josh Gambrell

Views: 84,364

Keywords: blender tutorial, blender hard surface modeling tutorial, hard surface modeling blender, blender, blender 3d, blender 3d modeling, hard surface, hard surface modeling, 3d modeling, blender bros, blender hard ops tutorial, blender boxcutter, mesh machine blender, mesh machine tutorial, blender beginner tutorial, blender guru, josh gambrell, ponte ryuurui, 3d, masterxeon1001

Id: 35DKVfF5PEU

Length: 11min 9sec (669 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 27 2023